MET’s Faculty Angle: When Calculating the Impact of Tariffs on Agriculture, Don’t Forget Flavor
By now, we are all much familiar with the inner workings of tariffs than we were months ago. In recent installments of Metropolitan College’s insight-driven Faculty Angle series, MET professors revealed both the mechanisms of tariffs as well as the ramifications of the ways President Trump has wielded them thus far into his term.
In MET’s latest Faculty Angle installment, Food Studies Lecturer José López Ganem explains the impact he expects tariffs to have on food and agriculture, including on food and flavor diversity in the US.
The first point of impact is the economic one. “Things are getting expensive,” López Ganem begins in Part 1 of the two-part Tariffs & Agriculture miniseries. But while some driving factors are environmental, like climate change, others, like tariffs, are man-made—and both stand to affect prices.
He also explains that consumers should not expect tariffs to lead to a renaissance of US-made food products in grocery stores. “Mexico is our most important ally in bringing diversity to our diets,” López Ganem says, adding that disruption to that trade relationship stands to have repercussions, including one that foodies in particular might notice: “The flavor is going to change,” he declares.
So, not only might the price of an avocado be different, but it could taste different too.
In Tariffs & Agriculture Part 2, López Ganem explains that those avocados don’t come cheap—and that tariffs could backfire.
“This is already a very complex situation. We have today, in the Mexican agricultural scene, a heavy influence of organized crime,” López Ganem says, adding that these syndicates have been labeled terrorist organizations by the American and Canadian governments. Complicating matters further is the number of Latin American farmers being deported from the United States to their native countries, affecting the work force both here and abroad. “This is something that, if it’s not coordinated or not thought out well, could implicate that exactly what we’re to solve, it actually is going to increase,” he says.
Ganam (MET’22) is also a graduate of MET’s Master of Art in Gastronomy program.
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